Stratification, elaboration and formalisation of design documents: Effects on the production of instructional materials

Abstract

Designers and producers of instructional materials lack a common design language. As a result, producers have difficulties translating design documents into technical specifications. The 3D-model is introduced to improve the stratification, elaboration and formalisation of design documents. It is hypothesised that producers working with improved documents ( n = 8) show a more efficient translation process and more satisfaction with the design documents than producers working with traditional documents ( n = 8). As expected, in the improved documents group, a higher agreement was found between the design documents and the technical specifications, which also required less time and less perceived cognitive load for their production. There were no differences in satisfaction with the design documents. The study shows that designers, working with the 3D-model, are able to improve design documents, resulting in a better translation process.

Subjective Representations of Educational Design Systems

“…E.g. Gibbons and Brewer [3] identified seven dimensions along which design languages may vary and Boot et al [1] made a list of seven layers that design documents may include.…”

Book Reviews

“…In contrast, some clear and succinct descriptions of the seven layers are present in journal articles (e.g. in an article coauthored by Gibbons: (Boot et al, 2007); this however may be due to the fact that this article is in a UK journal, and the editors and/or co-authors have influenced the style of writing to something that is closer to what I am used to. Thirdly, there is no reference to, or mention of, Laurillard's conversational framework for the effective use of learning technologies (Laurillard, 2001, first edition published 1993).…”

Cognitive effectiveness of visual instructional design languages

“…We identify three dimensions that reflect the characteristic management of domain complexity in VIDLs: (1) stratification, (2) elaboration, and (3) perspective. Stratification (organization) and elaboration (level of detail) have already been identified by (Boot, Nelson et al 2007) as important variables for improving the organization of design documents using a layered design architecture. The dimensions are explained in the following subsections.…”

“…Future research could profit from including user studies involving actual designers in realistic, controlled design settings over a longer period of time, for example as demonstrated in (Boot, Nelson et al 2007). However, we do believe that letting a larger sample of users evaluate example diagrams was consistent with the goals of the study, and provided a reasonable first test of the cognitive effectiveness and the perceived usefulness of the diagram types.…”

“…In practice, instructional designers find it difficult to use VIDLs due to their unfamiliarity and to the intrinsic complexity of the languages used (Boot, Nelson et al 2007). …”